Breeding Forms on the Infinite Plane by William Latham

Breeding Forms on the Infinite Plane, an exemplary work of Latham’s evolutionary art, creates biomorphic prints that resemble insect and crustacean forms. Latham collaborated with Stephen Todd to create intricate 3D shapes and textures using an artificial embryology system called Form Grow and an evolution-based search algorithm known as Mutator. This pioneering work, arguably the first computer-mediated evolutionary art, according to Philip Galanter, helped rejuvenate code-based art, sparking a new era of artistic experimentation. Mutator and FormGrow were developed by the pair at IBM on their state of the art mainframes beginning in 1987. The collaboration would only last for one more year in 1993. The work is actually a collaboration with Latham’s long-time collaborator Stephen Todd. Latham and Todd began working on the revolutionary generative art system, Mutator Evolutionary Art, together with a team at IBM beginning in 1987. Besides Latham and Todd, the team included Lance Putnam and Peter Todd. Their work displayed “strange organic, often serpentine, forms, produced using [an] “alternative evolutionary software system” (developed with Stephen Todd and team), which William uses to pick and breed 3D forms freed from the limits of the human imagination.” Latham and Todd collaborated on Mutator and FormGrow between 1987 and 1993 so this piece marks a middle-point in their time creating together. This evolutionary work of Latham and Todd can be considered proto-machine learning art, as the evolving, breeding features of the program—drawn directly from cybernetics and its feedback loops—are the predecessors of machines processing data to perform instructionless tasks, modern machine learning.